by Justine Cole
Her eyes flew to her hair. It curled in a shiny nimbus around her head, only the ends having retained any trace of the orange dye; the rest was a rich golden brown as warm as spilled honey. It was as if another had taken her place in front of the mirror.
With trembling fingers she unfastened her petticoats and then shed the thin camisole beneath so that she stood naked. Here, the steel jaws of poverty were giving up their hold more reluctantly, but the improvement was still amazing.
Her long legs were more shapely, the muscles beginning to define themselves. Although her rib cage was visible, each rib no longer stood out so rigidly, nor did her hip bones protrude at such sharp angles. She doubted that she would ever develop the fashionably dimpled buttocks and rounded stomach that so delighted painters and sculptors, but at least she looked healthy. Then she scrutinized her breasts. High and full, they stood out proudly from her body, the nipples blushed with coral.
Intensely she studied her reflection, searching for the truth of it, unclouded by her preconceptions. Her old self was gone. No one seeing her now would ever recognize this finely made sylphid as the shabby Soho pickpocket.
The breathless promise of the mirror's reflection stunned her.
Several weeks later, Scheherazade herself would not have felt out of place had she wandered into Constance's sitting room, for it looked like something from The Arabian Nights. Filmy gauzes and exotic silks lay next to gay muslins and taffetas that gleamed like precious jewels. Bolts of every stylish fabric of the day were strewn haphazardly about the room. Some lay in stacks; others were unrolled with great lengths draped across furniture, carpets and, in the case of a vibrant cherry satin, the arm of Madame Renée LaBlanc.
"C'est parfait, Madame Peale. With those beautiful eyes, it will be magnifique, non?"
"No." Constance shook her head. "Absolutely not. The color is much too vibrant; she has not yet come out." Despite Constance's tendency toward the ruffled and beribboned for herself, her taste was excellent, and she had an unerring instinct for the fabric and cuts that would be most flattering on Noelle.
"Ah, but of course, one forgets. Elle est tout sophistiqué, just like her charming curls. The old hairstyle of the Empire looks so fresh and modern on her." The dressmaker picked up another bolt. "Now this, perhaps, would be better."
Clad only in her chemise, Noelle stood on a small stool in the center of the room, thankful that the remainder of her carrot hair had fallen victim to Letty's scissors only the night before, leaving a short cap of curls. She was content to be a bystander as Constance and Madame LaBlanc discussed her. Since early morning she had been poked, prodded, and scrutinized from every direction. The garrulous little Frenchwoman's measuring tape had not missed a single curve of her blossoming figure.
Noelle's eyes wandered to the window, where raindrops were drilling against the panes. She was not going to be able to take a walk again today, the second day in a row. Still, there was something so agreeable about being inside on such a dreary day. So much better than haunting the wet, stinking alleys off Bow Street or Charing Cross Road.
As Noelle mused, Madame LaBlanc issued orders to her two assistants, sending them scurrying in a torrent of French and then countermanding her original instructions with conflicting ones. "Estelle, tu cagnarde, arrange cette chambre. Mariette, apporte- moi la soie verte. Celle-là. Non, tu imbécile, pas la verte, la blanche."
Madame LaBlanc handed Constance a small bolt of creamy silk. "Madame Peale, I must insist. Only this shade for Mademoiselle Pope's ball gown."
Constance unrolled the fabric and then held it out for Noelle to touch. "Do you like it?"
"It's beautiful." The delicate silk slipped through her fingers like raindrops. "I can't believe it's for me."
"Madame LaBlanc is correct, it will be perfect. Now, I think a rounded neckline, not very low . . ."
"Ah, but Madame Peale," the Frenchwoman interrupted as she began draping the creamy silk over Noelle's body. "A décolleté, perhaps a little off the shoulder, c'est à la mode. She is young, très belle. To show off a little is not too bad, eh?"
Constance threw up her hands in mock exasperation. "In truth, I don't know why I attempt to argue with you. Very well, I agree to the lower neckline but only if it is edged with a ruffle of the wide lace you showed me earlier. It will give a softness."
"Madame's taste is faultless, as usual." The submissive manner in which the dressmaker lowered her head did not fool either Constance or Noelle, and they exchanged a smile.
"Now, for the rest of the gown . . ." Constance began, only to be interrupted again.
"I'm sure madame will agree that the sleeve à la folle is too extreme." With an expressive lift of her eyebrows, Madame LaBlanc contemptuously dismissed the current fashion of grossly oversized sleeves. "I am certain you will prefer the balloon sleeve with a wide cuff in the same lace as the neck ruffle, noni"
For the rest of the day and much of the next, the discussions continued. Finally Madame LaBlanc and her assistants sealed themselves in the sewing room. But for Noelle, this was only the beginning.
Merchants arrived brandishing kid gloves and slippers with tiny bows. Shawls and reticules were purchased.
After several days, a simple cotton frock emerged from the sewing room, then another. Noelle slipped them on and pirouetted gaily in front of her mirror. A bolt of fine lawn was transformed into delicate chemises and petticoats. There was a beautiful morning gown, then an afternoon ensemble with a pleated bodice and tiny shoulder cape.
The days passed. A note arrived from Simon with a draft covering the first four months of her salary. The amount was staggering until, with Constance's assistance, she calculated the cost of the purchases that had been made on her behalf and, over the protests of her hostess, deducted a separate amount to pay her living expenses. She set aside the little that was left. Somehow she would have to get this money to the children. Otherwise she would find no pleasure in her new clothes.
The creamy silk ball gown was finished and hung carefully away in her closet. A gay sprigged muslin appeared. Noelle moved through her days as if in a dream.
The tutor Constance had hired appeared. The day of her first formal lesson she arrived in the library to find him standing at loose-limbed attention in the center of the room. Tall and spindly, he had thinning sandy hair and rimless glasses that kept slipping down his bony nose.
His adam's apple bobbed up and down in his cadaverous neck as he observed his new student. She stood before him in a lavender muslin frock. There was a delicate ruffle of deep violet at her throat and twin bands of the same color encircling the wide hem. A grosgrain belt emphasized her tiny waist. He took in the wide topaz eyes, the tawny cap of curls that barely brushed her ears. Oh, dear, he'd never imagined . . .
With shaking hands, he began searching the pockets of his ill-fitting jacket until he finally pulled out a much-abused scrap of paper. With his index finger, he shoved his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and consulted the paper.
"I'm looking for Miss Pope." His voice cracked like a pubescent choirboy's. Mortified, he tried again, but with little improvement. "I'm looking for Miss Dorian Pope."
Noelle suppressed a smile. "I'm Dorian Pope."
"Well, if you are M-M-Miss Pope, I think it is only I—I—logicai to conclude that I am to be your new tu-tutor. That is to say . . . I'm Percy Hollingsworth, instructor in history, geography, government, and ma-ma-mathematics."
Remembering Constance's instructions from the day before, Noelle glided toward him, her hand outstretched. "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Hollingsworth," she carefully articulated.
Crimson crept up from his collar; he stepped backward. Recovering, he braced himself and took her hand only to feel his knees turn dangerously weak at the touch of her warm flesh.
Noelle's amusement was tempered with curiosity. Was it this easy to make a man behave like a fool? It was a new idea—an intriguing one.
Percy Hollingsworth proved to be an a
ble, if somewhat unorthodox, instructor. Although he had had every intention of proceeding with Noelle's instruction in an orderly and sequential manner, she would tease him and torment him so that when the subject was not to her liking he soon abandoned the effort and let his student's natural curiosity and keen mind guide their lessons.
She returned from a walk, her magnificent eyes full of the beauty of a wildfiower she had discovered, and the lecture he had planned on ancient Greece was abandoned in favor of perusing Flora and Fauna of the English Countryside. When the London newspapers arrived each week, she pored over them—circling, underlining, demanding explanations.
She learned that Benjamin Peale had been with the Duke of Wellington at Quatre-Bras. The next morning she entered the library and presented her tutor with a handful of pebbles, ordering him to reenact the Battle of Waterloo on the library carpet. Constance, seeing the two of them sprawled so informally on the floor as she passed the door, had rushed into the library only to find herself ordered to take charge of Napoleon's main forces.
All in all, Percy Hollingsworth and Noelle were well satisfied with each other, and Constance was delighted with both of them. She was far from delighted, however, when a hastily scrawled note arrived one day from Simon:
My dear Constance,
I have just received word that there has been a fire at the American shipyard. If you will remember, I told you that Quinn had some trouble with a man named Luke Baker before he came to England. Baker may have been involved. At this point, I have no report on the extent of damages, but, regardless, duty dictates that I return home with all possible speed.
It is with regret that I leave my work unfinished here at the London office, but I trust you understand that I have no other recourse.
My warmest regards to Noelle. I have placed £500 in your name in the company account so you can administer her salary until my return.
Simon
Furious at the impersonal tone of the missive, Constance tossed it in the fire.
As the days went by, callers continued to arrive, more and more impatient to catch sight of the mysterious Miss Pope, but Noelle always managed to avoid them. At the first sound of carriage wheels crunching on gravel, she would seal herself in her room with her studies or slip out the back door and into the countryside.
With Christmas came another tutor to instruct her in piano and voice, as well as dance. It was at the latter that she excelled. Her step was light and fanciful, and it was not long before she outgrew her instructor.
Each day, Constance found time to instruct Noelle in the social graces. She learned to pour tea without spilling a drop, play whist, and use a fan. She could also effect a proper introduction and curtsy gracefully.
Noelle decided making polite conversation was, by far, the most difficult of the skills she had to learn until the time came when Constance told her she must be able to embroider. After a week of crooked stitches and tangled threads, Noelle uttered the foulest of oaths and tossed the wretchedly abused piece of fabric into the fire, declaring that she would begin to wear her knife again if she were forced to sew another stitch. Constance hastily surrendered.
Her progress with her studies was remarkable. Although Percy Hollingsworth was not an experienced tutor, even he recognized that she was an extraordinary student with keen insight and an exceptional memory. She spent all her spare time reading— devouring books, one after another.
The modern poets captivated her, and she loved to read their poems aloud to Constance. Her voice was low with a trace of huskiness that was appealing and strangely compelling. "The Prisoner of Chillón," "Endymion," "Kubla Khan"—they all whispered to her of mystery and beauty, and she would lose herself as she read.
She was living in a silken cocoon, and it was only in the darkest core of night that the careful insulation sometimes fell away, and the past crept upon her. When the nightmares plagued her, they were inhabited by the haunted phantasms she had left behind: the children, the withered old hags of the alleys, the poverty, stench —and, sometimes, the face of the man who was her husband.
She spent one February day studying the legend of Agamemnon, the king who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods, only to be murdered for his deed by his wife, Clytemnestra. When night came, she paced the floor of her bedroom until she was exhausted, knowing that a nightmare lurked on the other side of her consciousness.
Finally she sat at her desk and tried to put into words what churned inside her. She wrote:
Hatred coils inside my heart; Untempered by sunlight, it is wedded to my spirit, Waiting like vengeful Clytemnestra for the time When, unfettered, it will be set free to play its part.
When she finally fell asleep, it was only to become a victim of the nightmare she had feared. But, instead of the avenging Clytemnestra of her poem, she was Iphigenia, the virgin sacrifice, clutching at the robes of a faceless father, only to be torn away and held aloft over an altar. As her robes were ripped from her body, she felt herself being lowered to the altar. But in her dream it was not cold stone that met her naked flesh. It was a cloying, enveloping softness that sucked her into its depths and held her limbs captive. Helplessly she watched a swarthy figure approach her, his eyes of bitter black pushing her deeper into the suffocating mass. And then he was beside her, spreading gold coins on her body. Across her lips, her nipples, her stomach . . .
"One hundred pounds," he sneered, "one hundred pounds for the virgin."
She jolted awake, sweat drenching her body. The poem she had written was lying on the carpet. Springing from her bed, she tore it into tiny pieces and buried her words in the ashes of the fire.
Chapter Eleven
Watching from her bedroom window, Noelle saw the trim carriage come into view around the curve of the driveway. A sharp gust of April wind, reluctant to abandon the bite of March, threw itself against the rig, making it shudder as it approached the house. Inside the carriage were three people Noelle had never met: Mrs. Sydney Newcombe, her daughter, Margaret, and her son, Robert. Today, more than a year after Noelle had arrived at the white stone house, she was to take her first tentative steps into the world of the fashionable by having tea with Constance and the Newcombes.
"I confess that Mildred Newcombe is not my favorite acquaintance," Constance had said when she issued the invitation, "but she'll do very well for our purposes. She is so taken with her own opinions that she rarely notices anything else. So, if you do make a slip, it will undoubtedly pass her by. I've observed that her daughter is cut from much the same cloth."
Of course, when Constance had extended the invitation, she had not realized that Robert Newcombe, whom she had never met, had arrived from London to visit his mother and would be accompanying her here today. Still, Noelle knew she could not seal herself away forever. A disconsolate Percy Hollingsworth had left last week to take a new post; it was time for her to put to use what she had learned.
From below, she could hear the sounds of the Newcombes alighting from their carriage. To bolster her lagging self- confidence, she mentally catalogued her accomplishments: her table manners were flawless; she could dance exquisitely, play a simple tune on the piano, and speak without her accent or grammar betraying her. It was true that mathematics and needlework had escaped her; however, any well-bred young woman might be expected to have some failings, and thanks to the efforts of Constance and Mr. Hollingsworth, hers were few. She was even becoming proficient at making polite conversation, although it was frustrating to be restricted to such uninspiring topics as the weather or Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's latest romantic novel when she would much rather discuss more interesting subjects.
Noelle sighed as she thought of how much more there was for her to learn and wished she were curled up in the library, reading one of the books on the reading list Percy had left instead of standing here trying to get up enough courage to go downstairs. She moved to the mirror and checked her tawny hair. It was just long enough for her to catch up loosely off her neck with a satin
ribbon. Wispy escaping curls brushed the ñapé of her neck and feathered charmingly around her face. Reluctantly she picked up a paisley shawl and draped it around the shoulders of her well-fit bottle-green cashmere dress.
"I'm ready, lions." She smiled ruefully to herself as she slipped out of her room and prepared to step into the arena.
Robert Newcombe was bored. Dash it! He should have never let his mother talk him into coming with her today. Not that Mrs. Peale wasn't a pleasant surprise, but even she wasn't quite enough to make up for that cursed carriage ride, where he'd been captive to the incessant chatter of his mother and sister. Damn! He'd like to jump on a horse and ride to the nearest posting house for a full tankard of ale.
As the door of the drawing room opened, any serious intention Mr. Newcombe might have had of actually fleeing the Peale residence vanished instantly. Entering was a creature so exquisite, he could only stare speechlessly at her slender form.
"Dorian! Come in, my dear, and meet our guests."
The creature smiled charmingly as Mrs. Peale presented her to his mother and sister. Then she was standing in front of him, their eyes nearly level.